Fin­ished Talk Me Down by Vic­to­ria Dahl. I’ve seen a lot of folks on the Web rav­ing about Dahl’s con­tem­po­rary romances so I decided to try one.

In this book, a creepy ex-boyfriend dri­ves erotic romance writer Molly Jen­nings back to her tiny home­town of Tum­ble Creek, Colo. No sooner is Molly back in town than she runs into Ben Law­son, her girl­hood crush who is now the oh-so-sexy chief of police. Molly is eager to see if Ben still lives up to his crush-worthy sta­tus, but Ben is a lit­tle hes­i­tant, as he doesn’t date local women since the town is so small and gos­sip gets spread around so fast. Then, there’s the small mat­ter that Ben has no idea what Molly does for a liv­ing, since she keeps her job a secret from every­one. But when some­one starts stalk­ing Molly, Ben is deter­mined to pro­tect her no mat­ter what …

I liked a lot of things about this book — the Col­orado set­ting, the sec­ondary char­ac­ters, and espe­cially Ben and Molly. It was nice to read a book where the woman is flirty and fun-loving, and the guy was more reserved and seri­ous. (To me, it often seems like the guy is usu­ally the care­free one in romance books). There was also a cool twist with Molly’s stalker at the end, which I won’t spoil here. Let’s just say that I thought I knew who the bad guy was, but Dahl threw a lit­tle some­thing dif­fer­ent into the plot that I didn’t expect.

But I had one big issue with the book — the fact that Molly keeps her career as an erotic romance writer a secret from every­one, includ­ing her par­ents. I just didn’t think that was believ­able at all. How could you keep some­thing like that a secret for years? Espe­cially from your fam­ily? And more impor­tantly, why would you want to?

Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, but I work hard on my books and I want folks to know that those are my words they’re read­ing. Even my most dis­tant fam­ily mem­bers know that I write books (if I haven’t told them, then some­one else has). Even if I was writ­ing erotic romance and using a pen name like Molly does in the book, I’d still tell my close fam­ily mem­bers what I was doing.

It’s not that Molly isn’t proud of what she does, but she used Ben as the inspi­ra­tion for one of her sto­ries at the begin­ning of her career and now won­ders how he and every­one else will react if they find out what she does for a liv­ing. Okay, I can kind of under­stand that, but I also thought it was pre­sented as more of a conflict/problem than it really was.

Over­all, though, this was a fun, breezy con­tem­po­rary romance, and I’m inter­ested in read­ing the read of the Tum­ble Creek books. So thumbs up.

Up next: Plea­sure of a Dark Prince by Kres­ley Cole.

Books in my TBR pile: About 20.